


Morning Is a Long Way Down

by theleaveswant



Category: Fringe
Genre: Accidents, Amberverse, Angst, Confessions, Dom/sub, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Feeding, Kink Negotiation, Knifeplay, Love Confessions, Oral Sex, Porn Battle, Sensation Play, Service, Service Submission, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-19
Updated: 2012-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:27:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/theleaveswant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Olivia's eyebrows shoot up. "You washed my dishes?" Lincoln grimaces and looks down at the plate. "That's—"</i>
  <br/>
  <i>"Presumptuous, I know. I'm sorry."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morning Is a Long Way Down

Lincoln doesn't come until she tells him to, panting out his name as her fingers claw at his back and her body arches up from the soaked sheets to meet him, ecstatic and exhausted. After, he lies inside her for long minutes, his face buried in the crook of her shoulder as his cock softens, and Olivia silently strokes his hair and the back of his neck until his shaking subsides and she begins to drift off to sleep. She rouses long enough to hum and nod when Lincoln raises his head to ask if she'd like water, sighing contentedly after he pulls out and watching with half-closed eyes as he ties off the condom and finds his glasses and underwear, then rolling over for drier pastures and burrowing her face in her pillow. 

Olivia's eyes snap open again a moment later, it seems, at the movement of air across her skin as someone reaches for her face. She relaxes upon seeing that it's only Lincoln, stretching over her body to set a glass of water on the nightstand next to her head. He has a paring knife gripped in his teeth, a dishtowel over his bare shoulder, and a plate in his other hand. He puts down the glass and takes the knife from his mouth, sitting down beside her on the bed as Olivia blinks blearily and pushes up on her elbows.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't mean to wake you. I'll go to the living room, let you get some rest."

Olivia frowns. "Is that food?" She nods at the plate.

"Um," he says, lowering and tilting the plate for her inspection. The plate is covered in slices of cheese and apple wedges, neatly arranged in overlapping concentric circles.

"Lincoln!" Olivia says, looking up at him in delighted surprise.

"I thought you might like a snack," he says, setting the plate down on the bed next to her so that Olivia can take a piece of apple when she sits up. "I'm sorry that it took so long."

The apple, when Olivia bites into it, tastes bright and crisp. A spray of juice squirts down her chin and Lincoln reaches with the cloth to wipe it up while Olivia blushes.

"Why?" she asks with her mouth full, meaning 'why should you be sorry?' but guesses from the way that Lincoln blushes that he heard 'why did it take so long?'.

"I couldn't find a clean plate, so I had to wash one. I may have got a little carried away."

Olivia's eyebrows shoot up. "You washed my dishes?" Lincoln grimaces and looks down at the plate. "That's—"

"Presumptuous, I know. I'm sorry."

Olivia blinks. "I was going to say . . . I'm not sure what I was going to say. I was trying to think of the right word to express both gratitude and embarrassment at the state of my kitchen—you know I haven't been home much this week. But I'm pretty sure 'presumptuous' wasn't it." She frowns, thinking back to the deference Lincoln had shown her when she invited him into her apartment tonight; the polite, hesitant attentiveness he'd shown her; his apparent preoccupation with her pleasure and comfort over his own. Suddenly a dozen discrete clues begin to fall together, hinting at the shape of a larger puzzle. "Lincoln, are you—is this a thing?"

"A thing?" he asks, brows creasing as he stares at the browning fruit.

"All this . . . service? Is that what you're into?"

He snaps his face up to look at her, startled and a little guilty.

"Kind of?" he offers hesitantly. "It's just how I am, but I can try to stop if it's bothering you. You don't have to do anything for me, or anything. I don't want to put any pressure or expectations on you—"

"Lincoln. Lincoln, it's alright," Olivia says, stretching out her hands to touch and calm him. "I understand where you're coming from. I'm not exactly a stranger to D/s myself. That's what this is, right? Submission? I have no problem with that."

"Really?" he asks, voice small, and Olivia feels instantly furious with whomever made him so defensive and sure of rejection, who tried to convince him that his desire to serve was anything less than okay.

"Really, truly. In fact I'm kind of thrilled to hear it." She places a hand on his cheek, stroking the skin beneath the frame of his glasses with her thumb, then reaches for the knife in his hand. "Here," she says, and he gives it to her, watching her with wary but hopeful confusion. The knife is warm where he gripped it but cooler towards the blade and the end of the handle, a single piece of stainless steel. "Are you only a service submissive, or do you bottom for pain and sensation play as well? And are knives a squick or a trigger?"

His eyes widen a bit in surprised recognition at the jargon, so he's at least somewhat familiar with community rhetoric. He swallows. 

"I'm not going to cut you," Olivia clarifies. "Just run the edge across your skin. Do you trust me to do that?"

Lincoln sighs in relief. "I do, and they're not."

"Lie down."

Olivia shifts up onto her knees while Lincoln settles himself on his back on the bed with his feet at the pillow end. He shivers. Olivia holds the knife where he can see it.

"Do you want to do this?"

"Ma'am?"

Olivia frowns. "Don't call me that. I only want to do this if you do, with me. If you're only going along with this because you think you have to to make me like you _or_ because it fills some generic fantasy script, then I'm not interested. Now, do you want to do this?"

"Yes . . . Olivia."

"Tell me why."

"Because I've been in love with you since almost the moment we met and I'll do anything in my power to make you happy, and because I'm pretty sure I'm the luckiest man alive, if this is what makes you happy."

Olivia blinks because damn, that's more than she expected to hear, but the flush in Lincoln's skin, the way he keeps licking his lips, the intensity in his eyes dancing over her face instead of the knife in her hand, and, yes, the erection tenting his boxer briefs, all tell her that he's sincere. "Okay," she breathes, trying not to panic and surprised to discover that she isn't panicking at all. "I can work with that."

She starts by drawing the butt of the handle down the outside of Lincoln's nearer thigh, over his knee and down his shin.

"How did you know I had a thing for knifeplay?" She asks as she grazes the blunt edge of the blade up the sole of his foot from heel to arch, smiling as he shivers again with something other than nervousness. 

"I didn't." He swallows. "I just brought it for the fruit."

"Hmm, well isn't this a lucky coincidence, then." Olivia draws the knife up the inside of his leg, dragging blade over his lightly haired skin with the sharp edge angled obliquely away to minimize the chance of accidental cutting. She repeats the sequence on his other leg, leaning lower over his abdomen than she really needs to to better hear the soft gasps he's making and feel the heat rising from his body. "I do like knifeplay, and I'm pretty sure you like knifeplay too."

Lincoln huffs a laugh and nearly cuts his inner thigh; Olivia twitches the knife away just in time and waits for him to will himself to stillness again before she continues. "I'm liking this."

She grins and shifts her attention to his arms, scratching the tip of the blade lightly across his palm until he's squirming, gritting his teeth with the effort of holding his hand steady, his pulse thunderous in his wrist where she grips his arm. "You're beautiful like this," she tells him as she traces the broad edge of the blade up the insides of his wiry forearms, from his wrist past his inner elbows and over his biceps, pressing just hard enough that the skin scrapes pink in the wake of the metal's passage.

"You're always beautiful," he says, his gaze still more on her face than on the things she's doing to him with the knife, and Olivia has to look away from his face, keep her eyes on her hand, because there's that panic finally starting to trickle in. She tries hard not to rush, forced to lighten the pressure and use only the blunt edge while she fights to keep her hand steady as she completes her survey of the exposed surfaces of his body: other arm, belly and chest with an emphasis on nipples, throat, finally resting the tip of the blade just under his ear, at a pulse point, less than an inch from the curved arm of his glasses, while she kisses him. She suggested this, after all. She will not back down.

She moves the knife away, reaching out to place it on top of the plate of food without breaking her kiss while she moves to straddle Lincoln, her naked body pressing against his straining underwear and bare chest. She crawls up his body towards his head. Lincoln gets the hint and moves the other way, bracing his feet against the wall above her pillows and curling up on his elbows to press his face into her cunt while she digs her fingers into the edge of the mattress.

It should be good, even better than before—he's so into it and she's still wet from earlier, nevermind the fresh lubrication she's generated holding onto the metal knife and teasing him with the blade—but somehow Olivia just can't enjoy it. She shakes her head and pushes his face away from her cunt, raising her leg to climb off of him and lie down on the bed beside him, curled in on herself, facing away. 

"I can't," she says, as Lincoln rolls up to sitting, reaching tentatively for her shoulder. "I'm sorry. It's just that you're the first person who's told me they loved me since John."

"John Scott? The agent who died, who you first went to Dr. Bishop to try to save?"

She nods and twists around to look up at him, her eyes wide. "You didn't do anything wrong, Lincoln. I want you to know that. You couldn't have known I'd react like this, _I_ didn't know I'd react like this, so this is not your fault."

"I know," he whispers, drawing his hand away. He bites his bottom lip. "Do you want me to leave?"

"No," Olivia says, sitting up and reaching for his hands, "and I don't regret anything that happened tonight, either. I just feel like we—mostly _I_ —moved too fast, there, with the knife and all. Things got a little too intense, too quickly. But I don't want you to leave, and I don't want you to avoid me. I just want step back a bit, talk things out a bit more before we try again. Does that sound alright to you?"

Lincoln nods, and Olivia pets his head and neck again, gently. 

"Here," she says again, and leads him by the hand back up towards the head of the bed. She begins to pile the pillows together so that she can prop herself against them, and Lincoln immediately moves to help her. She settles back against the pillows, drawing Lincoln in to curl at her side with his head on her breast. 

She reaches for the plate of cheese and apples, moving it away from the edge of the bed that it's been drifting precariously towards, and picks up a piece of cheese. She offers the cheese to Lincoln, who opens his mouth obediently to bite it in half, then wipes a crumb from his lip before popping the remaining half in her own mouth. "Tell me," she says, pausing to chew and swallow before she continues, "about how you discovered that you were into kink."

Lincoln takes a deep breath and, looking down, Olivia can see him blinking rapidly as he thinks about how to answer. She eats a wedge of apple while she waits for him, offering a second one to Lincoln. He takes the apple in his hand, looking at it.

"It's okay," she says. "Take your time. We've got all night, and then some."

He sighs, turning the piece of apple over and over as he begins to speak. "When I was about sixteen . . ."

**Author's Note:**

> Started for Porn Battle XIII then put aside because it wasn't finished before deadline and because it was turning out too angsty. Decided to leave it that way because, you know what, that's realistic. People are rigged with emotional boobytraps and shit don't always go right, and as much as it often feels like my duty as a kinky person to give the practice good PR, the truth is scenes do go sideways, often for worse reasons than this, and we ought to be honest about that while trying to learn from it (the lesson is usually that we need more/better communication, and that's not just a kink thing).


End file.
